Kamala Harris will make her second visit to western Pennsylvania in less than a week on Thursday, as the Democratic candidate focuses her presidential campaign on voters at both ends of the battleground state.
Harris appeared at a union hall in Pittsburgh on Monday alongside US President Joe Biden, but will be back in the city on Thursday, days before she heads to a debate with Donald Trump in Philadelphia. Campaign officials say she will remain in the state throughout the weekend as she prepares for the debate.
Harris’s trip comes at a pivotal point, with polls putting her and Trump neck and neck in the race to secure Pennsylvania’s 19 Electoral College votes — more than in any other swing state.
“The state is in play, and the path to 270 for either candidate can run through Pennsylvania,” said Kristen Coopie, a political-science professor at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, referring to the number of Electoral College votes needed to win the White House in November.
“[The campaigns] know the state is important. They know there is a wide representation of citizens just within one state . . . it is pretty representative of the country at large.”
Harris also arrives amid an escalating political fight over the ownership of US Steel, an iconic American manufacturer and major employer in Pittsburgh, whose future has become an electoral issue. Harris and Trump have both come out against a proposed $15bn takeover of US Steel by Japan’s Nippon Steel — a protectionist stance designed to court blue-collar votes in the state. On Wednesday, the Financial Times reported that Biden was preparing to block the deal on national security grounds.
US Steel has said that if the merger fails it could close plants, raising the stakes ahead of Harris’s Pennsylvania trip, her 10th visit to the state this year.
Trump — who narrowly survived an assassination attempt in July in Butler county, just north of Pittsburgh — has also made the state a focus of his campaign.
On Wednesday night, the former president, was interviewed by Fox News host Sean Hannity in front of a live audience in Harrisburg, the state capital. After vowing to “heal our world”, invoking the praise he had received from Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister, Trump expressed confidence in his chances to win the election and touted his “love” for Pennsylvania. “We’re going to be very well set up to do a great job,” he said.
Both campaigns have spent more on advertising in Pennsylvania than in any other state, according to FT analysis of AdImpact data, with the Harris campaign and allied groups spending nearly $146mn to date and the Trump team almost $132mn.
The winner of Pennsylvania — whose population spans diverse, urban areas such as Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, highly educated affluent suburbs and poorer rural areas — has won the White House in 10 of the past 12 presidential elections.
Margins of victory in Pennsylvania have been small. In 2020, Biden defeated Trump by about 80,000 votes. Four years earlier, Trump beat Hillary Clinton by about 44,000 votes, or less than a percentage point.
Patrick Murphy, a former Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania, said the state remained a “toss-up” with just two months to go in the race, but insisted it was an “absolutely, positively, must win” for Harris.
A CNN poll from Pennsylvania published on Wednesday found the two candidates tied, each with support from 47 per cent of likely voters. An FT average of statewide polls in Pennsylvania also shows Harris and Trump in a statistical tie, with Harris enjoying an edge of just 0.4 points.
Charlie Dent, a former Republican congressman from Pennsylvania and Trump critic, said that given the former president’s tendency to over-perform polling in past elections, he may already have an advantage over Harris.
But he added Harris was still better positioned than Biden had been to defeat Trump this time.
“The advantage that [Harris] has is that she is the newer, fresher face,” Dent said. “Biden was struggling in Pennsylvania for the same reasons he was struggling with voters in all of these other states: they thought he was too damn old. That was true in Pennsylvania and it was true all over the country.”
Ed Rendell, the former Democratic governor of Pennsylvania and a former chair of the Democratic National Committee, said Harris had “heightened enthusiasm”, which would bring out more voters than Biden.
“But what percentage of the vote is she going to get?” he said. “Will she persuade the voters who haven’t made up their mind? That remains to be seen.”
Democrats and non-partisan analysts said that to win Pennsylvania, Harris would need to run up her margins in the traditional Democratic strongholds of Philadelphia and its suburbs while stemming losses in rural parts.
But she has faced doubts about her shifting stance on fracking for shale gas, an important part of western Pennsylvania’s economy — opposing the practice in 2019 but now supporting it.
Her reversal on shale, like her comments this week that US Steel should remain “American owned and American operated”, were seen as calculated moves to appeal to blue-collar and labour union voters.
Others insist Pennsylvania’s vote will ultimately be decided by voters in the middle of the income bracket and the ideological spectrum.
“It is important to talk about the construction jobs and the union jobs and the blue-collar jobs,” said Michael LaRosa, a former Biden administration official and a Pennsylvania native. “But where Democrats tend to falter is by losing the people in the middle, the people who are not in construction and blue-collar jobs or union jobs, who are not wealthy and who make up the vast majority of the suburbs of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Scranton and Reading. It’s really important that you speak to [them] too.”
Additional reporting by Oliver Roeder in New York
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